Answer the questions. Question the answers.

Month: May 2016

In the Book of Mormon, we read of many Antichrists, and the fates that befall them. In Jacob chapter 7, we read of Sherem, trying to overthrow the doctrine of Christ. He clashes with Jacob and insists that Jacob show him a sign. In response, Jacob invites God to smite Sherem, which God does. This moves Sherem to repent and testify of Christ just before his death. Interestingly, Jacob was sure that Sherem would deny any sign he received, but Sherem did the opposite.

Another famous Antichrist from the Book of Mormon is Korihor, the atheist. In Alma chapter 30, Korihor denies not only Christ, but God and prophecy and afterlife as well. Alma the Younger confronts him, and Korihor demands a sign. He gets one: God takes away his voice. Korihor then testifies (via writing, of course) that God took away his voice, and never preaches against God again. He didn’t get a very nice sign, but like Sherem, he got a sure sign, and it convinced him and all his followers.

Some Antichrists don’t meet such bad ends. Alma the Younger was himself an Antichrist, along with his friends, the four sons of King Mosiah. In Mosiah chapter 27, we find them trying to destroy the church of God. But without their ever demanding one, they receive a sign: an angel appears and commands them to repent, with a voice that shook the earth. The shock leaves Alma catatonic for two days, but he recovers, and he becomes a powerful advocate for the church of God, along with Mosiah’s sons. It would appear that signs from God are very convincing.

So why is it that we don’t see these signs today? Why is it that I have never received one?

You may say that God is sparing me by not granting me such violent signs. It certainly is true that these signs, taken by themselves, are not pleasant at all. But when taken in context, the signs appear to be ultimately beneficial to the people who received them. Consider Korihor, who lost his voice but gained a certainty of God. Isn’t that worth it? Take an example from Disney: Ariel the mermaid gave up her voice to be with the man she loved. How much better a deal, then, to be with God in exchange for your voice! Yet no one has ever made me the offer. Why not?

These aren’t the only incidents of God displaying power in the Book of Mormon. We read of God destroying prisons, taming beast, lighting up the night sky as bright as day, protecting his servants with an angel or a ring of fire, and other signs. The scriptures seem to indicate that these signs, harsh as some of them were, had some power to convince people to believe in God and keep His commandments. So why don’t we see these signs today?

The Bible, too, is full of such signs. God sent plagues on Egypt to convince them of His power. He cursed the Philistines with mice and hemorrhoids for stealing the Ark. He sent down fire from heaven to refute the priests of Baal. He delivered Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from a superheated furnace to show His power to Nebuchadnezzar. So where have these signs gone?

The Book of Mormon assures us that these miracles are still happening; when I searched for miracles+ceased in the Book of Mormon, I got six results that assured me that miracles have not ceased, and two results listing specific circumstances in which miracles did cease due to wickedness. There are millions of active Mormons in the world, so by Mormon standards, we’re not living in a time of great wickedness; in other words, the circumstances that prevent miracles do not apply. So, where are the miracles? There are plenty of hostile voices declaring the church to be false; why are they not silenced like Sherem or called to repentance like Alma? Why hasn’t anything like that happened to me?

This absence of the miraculous shows up even in church talks. Consider Jeffrey Holland’s 2008 talk, The Ministry of Angels. He begins by recalling angelic visitations to Adam and Eve, to Mary, to Lehi, and to Jesus, and then he moves to more modern times, recalling an experience of the late Clyn D. Barrus… but Clyn’s story has no angels in it at all! The closest we get is Clyn’s father saving him from drowning, which Clyn very much appreciated, of course, but what about the heavenly beings the scriptures tell us about? Where are they?

I opened this piece with a series of negative signs – punishments from God, in other words – because I am willing to accept any sign from God at this point. If I am unworthy of signs like visions and healings, then give me a punishment for my sins, a divine spanking, and I will be satisfied, because I will at last have evidence that God cares. But I cannot get even that, and apparently, neither can anyone else. There are no signs at all. So does God actually care?

I won’t debate now whether there is a God or not (I tend to think not, but there’s room for disagreement). Instead, let’s assume that there is a God, and ask: what has God done lately? Where is the evidence that God interacts with us at all? As far as I can tell, the answers to these questions are, in order, “nothing” and “nowhere”. When we listen for God’s voice, we hear only divine hiddenness. When ordinary folks like us cry out “Oh God, where art thou?”, we don’t get a response. And what is the point of believing in God, even a true God, if God doesn’t care about us?

The old scriptures (which aren’t necessarily true) tell of God’s great deeds, but they cannot make up for the lack of God in the present. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob may have had good reason to believe, but we in the present have good reason not to believe at all.

In October 1999, National Geographic unveiled the fossil of a new species of dinosaur. They called it Archaeoraptor liaoningensis, and trumpeted it as a new and exciting transitional fossil between dinosaurs and birds. The excitement proved to be short-lived, because the fossil was a fraud. It was made out of pieces of real creatures: the upper body of a bird called Yanornis, the tail of a dinosaur called Microraptor, and the legs of something else entirely; there might be up to 5 specimens represented in the stitched-up final product. The original finder of the fossil pieces knew that complete fossils fetch higher prices, so they cemented the parts together, hoping that the real pieces would create a convincing fake.

On October 15, 2012, smartphone enthusiasts were abuzz over rumors of a new offering from Sony: the Nexus X. Photos of this new model had mysteriously surfaced, and tech reporters and commentators happily picked them apart. But some suspected that the photos were fake, and soon their suspicions were confirmed: the creator of the photos came forward and revealed that it was a hoax. The clever faker, Ti Kawamoto, had taken photos of features of other Nexus phones, including the Xperia Ion and Xperia TL, created a 3D model, and simulated photos using the model. Kawamoto used the traits of existing phones to make his pictures of a nonexistent phone seem more credible.

I mention these two examples because they have a common trait which, I believe, is found in many fakes and frauds: the fake object is made out of pieces of real objects, so that the false whole may borrow authenticity from its true parts. This is often successful, but the sources of the pieces, and the gaps between them, eventually become apparent, revealing the hoax for what it is.

There are many examples of this. Piltdown Man, made out of a human cranium and an orangutan jawbone. The Solid Muldoon, sculpted out of mortar, rock dust, clay, plaster, ground bones, blood and meat. Nick Simmons’s Incarnate, with panels and character designs copied from Bleach, Hellsing, One Piece, Deadman Wonderland, and other manga, along with pieces from DeviantArt. The Feejee Mermaid, with a monkey’s body grafted onto a fish’s tail. Quentin Rowan’s Assassin of Secrets, which plagiarized Ian Fleming, John Gardner, Charles McCarry, Robert Ludlum, James Bamford, and more. Over and over again, fakers have created Frankenstein’s monsters to sell to the world, but keen-eyed skeptics keep seeing the stitches.

This brings me to something which I spent many years accepting as a genuine article, but which I now see as a stitched-up hoax: the Book of Mormon.

Let’s begin in the Book of Jacob, chapter 5, in which we find the prophecy of Zenos concerning the house of Israel. It begins with the narrator comparing Israel to an olive tree, with the master of the vineyard trying to save it. The master and his servants put a lot of work into the tree, grafting wild branches on, taking branches off and planting them elsewhere in the vineyard, seeking to gather fruit before the season is over and the vineyard gets burned. The whole chapter is a parable, describing the Lord’s effort to raise up righteous people before the end of the world.

Now notice the transition: the chapter began by comparing Israel to a single olive tree, but by the end, the narrator is talking about multiple trees, and discussing his plans for the vineyard as a whole. Why the change?

Like my previous examples, Jacob 5 is a composite, and the sources of its pieces are not too hard to find. The first part comes from Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, chapter 11, where Paul compares Israel to an olive tree with branches grafted in. The second part comes from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 5, where Isaiah compares Israel to a vineyard that brings forth wild grapes. The rough transition between the two can be seen as Jacob 5 switches from comparing Israel to a tree (see verse 3) to comparing Israel to the whole vineyard (in verse 40, the tree is dying; in verse 41, the Lord weeps over the whole vineyard). They simply don’t mesh. Curt van den Heuvel provided an analysis where he finds more pieces copied from the Bible, such as Luke 13:6-9, where we find the Lord instructing his servants to dig about a tree, and dung it (compare Jacob 5:64). The pieces make up an interesting whole, but they do not truly belong together. The assembly is a fraud.

The rest of the Book of Mormon reveals itself to be full of stolen pieces. The WordTree Foundation did a thorough study that detected numerous quotations from The Late War between the United States and Great Britain, a popular educational text from 1816, within the Book. Stripling soldiers, bands of robbers, curious workmanship, pitching tents on the borders, freemen versus king’s men… Joseph’s first published work is peppered with snippets from the 1816 history book. Even the general style appears to be copied: The Late War was deliberately written “[i]n the Scriptural Style”, and the Book of Mormon has an obvious resemblance to scripture (meaning the Bible, of course). And speaking of the Bible: the Book of Mormon quotes the Bible many times, even when the alleged writer could not possibly have had access to the passage being quoted (or when the passage being quoted is actually a mistranslation). Then there are little pieces from other sources, such as a passage lifted from Josiah Priest and the famous vision of the Tree of Life being copied from a dream by Joseph Smith, Sr. I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. The pieces don’t truly fit where they’ve been placed, and their source is too obvious. The Book of Mormon is a fraud.

Other works by Joseph Smith reveal the same problems. The Book of Abraham, for instance, contains ideas and excerpts from The Philosophy of a Future State, a work first published in 1830. Researchers have found pieces from other sources as well, none of which would have been available at Abraham’s time. Then there are the names, which are Hebrew instead of Egyptian, and the flow of the text, which is just too similar to the King James Bible, much like the Book of Mormon. We might also consider the facsimiles. The copies in the official text have features which puzzled Egyptologists, until they recovered the original of Facsimile 1 and a faithful copy of Facsimile 2 and discovered that Joseph had filled in the gaps in the originals with parts that didn’t match the wholes. Like the Archaeoraptor fossil, there is an illusion of completeness, but the parts do not truly fit together into a coherent whole.

Nexus X

Even Joseph Smith’s revision of the Bible has some features of a patchwork fraud. We should first note that the Bible itself is partially fraudulent: the King James version (KJV) of the Bible has 48 scribal additions (unauthorized insertions by later authors into an original text). It is reasonable to expect that a true prophet of God would detect these rude additions and excise them, but, as this analysis shows, Joseph Smith removed only one of these additions! Then there are 350 more verses that include scribal alterations or mistranslations, and Joseph removed only 11 of them. Then there are Joseph’s translations of specific words: he defines “Golgotha” as “burial” instead of “skull” and “Cephas” as meaning “seer” in addition to meaning “stone” (wrong on both counts). He also introduced a new word “Rabcha”, which he defined as meaning the same thing as the Hebrew “Raca”, meaning “fool”. But “Rabcha” is not a Hebrew word at all; the only “Rabcha” I’ve been able to locate is this village in India. In short, Joseph failed to take out the false pieces in the Bible, and added a few clearly false pieces of his own. (Do read the analysis I mentioned for more explanation and even more errors, along with this compilation from MormonThink.)

As a field, archaeology survived the loss of Archaeoraptor, because there are other fossils that are internally consistent and that come from trustworthy sources; in fact there are thousands of fossils like that, giving us a wealth of reliable data to study the world with. But Mormonism cannot survive the loss of these three texts of Joseph Smith. Even the loss of one text is deadly to Mormonism, because we would not expect a true prophet to put forth any false scripture, so if one is definitely false, what about all the others? But when we have three frauds that Smith declared to be significant revelations, and that together constitute the bulk of Joseph’s canonized work, we can say beyond reasonable doubt that he was not a prophet of God. (Unless God is a liar, but I’d rather not consider that possibility.) It is no use trying to believe in Joseph’s claims anymore. Like the Nexus X, the true Church never really existed, and we must look for truth elsewhere.

The lightsaber: an instantly recognizable symbol of all things Star Wars. A blade of pure light, capable of slicing through nearly anything, and, in the right hands, of deflecting energy blasts away from the wielder and right back at the enemy. An elegant weapon, for a more civilized age. It’s pretty awesome.

But it’s not awesome enough.

Mediocre!

Let me explain. Like many socially awkward white males with a taste for fedoras, I am fond of many Japanese television shows and video games. Among these shows and games, there are very many people with magic swords, or with magic powers expressed through swords. Consider Link, who can whirl his sword about him in a glowing cyclone of death, cutting anything close to him, or else shoot his sword forward like a bullet. Pretty handy abilities, no? And he’s not alone. Chrono from Chrono Trigger can also spin about to slice multiple enemies at once, and he can also shoot with his sword, cutting anything in his way with a slash made of wind. (See also: Jubei from Ninja Scroll and Inuyasha from, well, Inuyasha) And those are just the guys who specifically use wind to cut up their foes. Ichigo from Bleach just slashes with spiritual energy. And while I’m on the subject of Bleach, how about Ichimaru Gin, whose sword can suddenly extend forward to incredible length, putting everyone within stabbing distance? (Related: Goku’s Power Pole from Dragon Ball, and the Monkey King’s staff from Journey to the West) Or Hinamori Momo, whose sword can throw fireballs, or Kuchiki Byakuya, who can split his blade into a thousand remote-controlled razor-sharp flying petals, or… I could go on about Bleach, but I’ll spare you. The point is that all these swords and swordsmen have excellent offensive capabilities, striking down enemies in a manner and efficiency usually reserved for machine guns. When these guys bring a knife to a gunfight, the gunners are afraid.

Now compare this to lightsabers. For the most part, lightsabers have equal or better defensive powers than the swords I’ve just listed, but they fall behind in offense. When Jedi get into a firefight, they have to wait for their foes to shoot them, so that they can throw the shots back, or for their foes to get close enough to cut, so they can cut them down one by one. This is a very inefficient and vulnerable position to be in, compared to everyone listed above. And these are supposed to be superior to blasters? If the Jedi in Attack of the Clones had used blasters along with their blades, they could have cut down their foes much more quickly (and reduced their own losses). If Finn had found a blaster in addition to his borrowed lightsaber, he could have shot TR-8R before the angry trooper tasered his former comrade. So why are the Jedi putting themselves at a disadvantage? Couldn’t they carry guns and swords, like Gundams do? Or how about following Squall Leonhart’s example, and using gun-swords?

(I might also note that there is one circumstance where Jedi exclusively use blasters: vehicular combat. Whether they’re flying space fighters or snow speeders, Jedi use guns alongside everyone else, and they seem to like it that way.)

I don’t wish to discount the many things that lightsabers do well. Unlike normal blades, they are all edge and no face, so whichever way you swing it, it’s guaranteed to cut. Plus, since the blade has no mass, you can swing it about with ease and never lose control, and when you’re done with it, the blade just disappears, leaving a light and compact cylinder that’s easy to transport and store. Then there’s the way they burn and cut at the same time, for extra destruction, and they’re really, really good at defense. But I still maintain that all this is not awesome enough.

Star Wars is not a hard sci-fi setting, but it is still subject to Clarke’s third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And the tech in Star Wars is magical indeed; handheld objects that can shoot blazing projectiles of pure energy, defensive walls that can hold off staggering impacts while remaining invisible, mechanical golems that think and act as humans do, vehicles that can float like balloons, fly faster than the wind, soar into the vacuum of space, and then rush faster than light to traverse the vast blackness between the stars… If actual magic wishes to hold its own against such powerful techno-juju, it’s going to have to up its game. We might as well start with improving our magical weapons.

First, lightsabers’ offense should be as good as their defense; if you know how to use a lightsaber, you’ll never want for a blaster. Second, lightsabers should be more unique. Notice all the different styles of attack I mentioned above? This variety is the norm in many fictional settings, especially those that involve martial arts, and it should be the norm in Star Wars. Not only will different lightsabers have different handles and colors, but they will have different attacks. Some will fire stabbing bolts, some will throw arcs like Guile’s Sonic Booms, some will flow like long streamers or dance like arcs of lightning, and some will do other things entirely. Ideally, the style of the blade will tell us something about the personality of the wielder. But whatever they do, they will be dangerous, and when soldiers anywhere see a stranger with a saber, they’ll be very, very careful about engaging them.

It’s too late to change what has already been written, but it’s not too late to change what will be written in the future. I propose that we all incorporate this more magical style of lightsaber into all Star Wars fiction. Leave a comment to let me know what you make of my proposal, and May the Fourth be with you. (It’s 11:25pm where I’m writing this, so this is my last chance to say that.)

P.S. I suggest that this same kind of change (making something more powerful and more individualized) should also be made to Force powers. Even without a weapon, a Jedi can wield the Force, and if it’s powerful enough to levitate X-Wings, it’s powerful enough to deliver deadly punches, and range attacks too. (Why should only the Sith get ranged attacks? Ryu’s a good guy, and he gets to throw fireballs.) And we’d never put up with a group of superheroes who all had the same powers, so why put up with it from a group of Jedi? Everyone should have different strengths and weaknesses, and some way of using the Force that’s uniquely their own.

P.P.S. While researching for this piece, I came across a fascinating item: the gun axe. The world is full of wonder.

The following analysis is probably not original to me, but I’ll share it anyway because I haven’t heard anyone else say it yet. If you know of a similar analysis, please share in the comments.

Among the many topics it discusses, the Book of Mormon covers these two points:

Writing on metal plates is hard

Great are the words of Isaiah

Now, there’s nothing wrong with either of these (the first is an obvious fact, and the second is a popular viewpoint with some merit to it) but these points actually come into conflict within the Book of Mormon, in a manner that calls into question the Book’s authenticity.

First, let’s consider the business of writing on metal plates. This is not an easy task, and as you might expect, the writers in the Book of Mormon write frankly about the troubles involved. Jacob mentions how hard the actual engraving on metal is (but also mentions the advantage that plates have over less durable writing surfaces) and Moroni appears to talk about it, too. Jarom mentions that the plates themselves are small, as do several other writers, including Amaleki and Moroni; this is separate from the difficulty of engraving, but still a real problem with metal plates, because you have to get the right kind of metal, and you have to get enough of it, and you have to pound it into sheets, before you can engrave anything. To alleviate the space problem, the writers employed a special compact writing system that they call “reformed Egyptian”, which saves space at the cost of clarity (it’s debatable whether this reformed Egyptian exists at all, but for the time being, we can acknowledge that giving up writing quality to save space is the sort of exchange that any writer might make if they had to do all their writing on metal). The message is clear, consistent, and realistic: writing on plates sucks.

Then there’s the business of Isaiah. According to this source, there are 20 complete chapters of Isaiah that are included in the Book of Mormon, with minimal alterations and no abbreviations. The text itself explains why: Nephi chooses Isaiah to persuade his brothers to believe in Christ, Jacob reminds us that Isaiah had a special message for all of the house of Israel (including the Nephites), Abinadi quotes a chapter to chastise some wicked priests, and Jesus himself is quoted as saying that “great are the words of Isaiah”. Everyone values Isaiah as a mighty prophet, revealing Israel’s future and persuading all to come unto Christ.

But why did they go to the lengths of quoting entire chapters of Isaiah?

No sensible person can dispute that it’s hard writing on plates; it takes more time, more effort, and more precious material than nearly every other method of recording data. In the face of such difficulties, you take every measure possible to reduce the amount of writing you have to do, including getting rid of all redundancy. And here, the conflict arises, because all the writers of the Book of Mormon had to know that they would be adding redundancy by quoting Isaiah. Nephi, and all his contemporaries and descendants, had access to the brass plates, which included the writings of Isaiah. When Jesus arrived, he commanded the people to search the words of Isaiah, confirming that the people still had them. Mormon and Moroni might be excused for including some Isaiah, in case people in the future no longer possessed the prophet’s writings, but Moroni claimed to have seen our day by the power of God; didn’t he see that we would have the complete works of Isaiah, so that he and his father wouldn’t have to transcribe any of it? Remember: the Book of Mormon gives us no new writings of Isaiah, nor even an improved translation of existing writings. So why did the writers waste their time, stress their hands, and squander their metal on preserving something already well-preserved?

If we take the Book of Mormon at its word, we can only conclude that the writers were very, very stupid. But there is an alternative explanation: the writers of the Book of Mormon were not writing on plates.

I previously linked to an analysis that disputes the existence of “reformed Egyptian” (all the Egyptian writing systems we know of are less compact than Hebrew), but the analysis also discusses other characteristics of the Book of Mormon that are inconsistent with writing on plates. There are very many repetitions that do not seem to add any information or clarity. Consider Alma 21:19, that ends with “serve him, or be his servant“. Did those four words tell us anything new? Or consider 3 Nephi 11:37-38: it is not an exaggeration to say that those two verses have the exact same message, so why bother writing both? Then there are incredibly wordy passages (the critic takes one passage of 423 words and reduces it to 79; judge for yourself if any information is lost). Anyone engraving on metal would have to be very stupid and very stubborn to subject themselves to such useless effort. But someone writing on parchment, or dictating, would not have the same difficulty. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the text in the Book of Mormon was never written on metal plates.

There is good reason to suspect that the Book of Mormon is a 19th-century document. There is also good reason to suspect that Joseph Smith was capable of writing it. These reasons become more compelling when we see that the Book’s official origin story is virtually impossible; we would have to accept that multiple generations of prophets of God were utter morons who wore out their hands and used up their gold for nothing. Rejecting the Book’s declared origin may lead you to frightening conclusions, but for the sake of honesty, you have to face them. To quote P. C. Hodgell: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” You owe yourself nothing less.